How Do SEO and Pay Per Click campaigns work, and will I need that?

You’ll certainly need some kind of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO efforts and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are key to making sure that your customers and clients can actually find your page when they search for it (or just for your type of business) in Google or any other search engine. Here is how SEO and PPC work, and how they are different:

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the art of making a website or group of websites more visible on search engines without paying to have it promoted or advertised by the search engine itself. This is sometimes called ‘organic’ SEO to further emphasise the distinction to PPC, which is explained right.

SEO involves managing the structure and coding of the website itself, and especially the text and image content inside it, to seem as relevant as possible to certain search terms that someone may enter into Google. If they searched for ‘Used Cars in Brighton’ and you sold used cars in or near Brighton, you would want to be among the first results Google returned. SEO is about making it very clear to Google’s computers that your site is what searchers for certain terms want to find.

Organic SEO is vital to bringing in ‘earned’ traffic, which you do not have to pay for. This is an important source of visitors even of you are running a PPC campaign at the same time.

PPC

Pay Per Click (sometimes called Cost Per Click/CPC) is a way of buying promotion directly form Google and other search engine operators. Google AdWords is probably the most popular PPC scheme, but Microsoft Bing Ads is another example. A PPC campaign involves bidding a certain amount to have your site featured for searches of certain specific keywords.

PPC campaigns are a vital part of online marketing and reaching certain high-value potential customers. However, it will not completely replace the need for organic, unpaid SEO in bringing visitors to your site.